My loving sibby once told me to look around me while on a bus. Said look to the left of you, look to the right. Everyone you see is full of shit. Was a nice gesture, and I think I’ve kept that with me always =)

This is life.

It’s good to know this thirty year old game will be ten in a couple of months. I love it, but I absolutely have never beat it because I cannot get past the fkin dummy! I have tried three times, three separate times. I gave up and just figure I can acknowledge a game is good, while being absolutely unable to beat it.

I have absolutely no idea how you did it! My hands gave out. I mean I was literally hurting. I said no game should be physically hurting me if it’s not DDR and I am not poorly stomping my way through the rhythm =P! So yeah, I stopped playing. That’s when I decided to reach out, because I couldn’t imagine I was the only one with this issue. More power to you if you stuck with it. Get that gold for the both of us =)

Set em, let em be known. Evaluate offenders: ignorance, disrespect, necessity? I think they can be “soft” which I guess is sort of against the idea. I think in life we need to be flexible though. I guess this is all to say - it’s good to know yourself and your needs. You are absolutely welcome to leave spaces that oppress you. Not all oppression spheres can be ignored, and instead must be handled. Not all boundary breakers are oppressive, sometimes things must be met regardless of feelings. Sometimes people break things because they forget (a simple example is dead-naming which I think can happen with people accidentally - it’s sort of an extreme example but it’s what came to mind). Sometimes you need to meet people half-way because that’s just life. You can find a way to honor other people’s boundaries while honoring your own. Thanks for asking, although it felt like it was sort of out of left field =P!

It’s good to have boundaries =)

That’s because it’s fucking amazing tho foreals =X!

I am not sure if you even keep playing games like that but often it’s those ones that end up having to get returned. Which is such a bummer, because it so easily could be solved. Most times when you reach out to the company though (or devs, which ever) unless it’s a really small team they will typically ignore your requests. Any time I have had accessibility requests, without hesitation smaller teams have implemented them almost immediately. Likewise they’ve asked if there is anything else that I might need. I know we’re getting better at accommodating people, but there are still people who believe you can just “get gud” and work through these problems. When in actuality, they game-ending experiences. Which really sucks. Thanks for sharing by the by =)

I sadly have little interest in watching things about Hades as because I am so burnt out from asking for accessibility assistance (I actually think I did it multiple times in case they didn’t catch it) and I am just frustrated with them as a whole and this post reignited it. But I am glad that they got what they wanted because Greek mythology is expansive. I think someone else will be happy about it. I just think I realized I feel relatively “done” with the company as a whole =/!

Wonderful job, looks great! The best piece might be on the inside. It’s got a great grain.

My partner has a rare type of colorblindness that makes certain comfy games completely unplayable. I wanna scream at the screen, because I wish that it were easier in this life to make things more accessible for all people in general. I sit in the same camp with you, the more the merrier when it comes to support. I get sad when I open a game, and I see nothing (cause the first thing I do is always check the options). I tend to not buy games with certain things like flashy effects, qtes, or a need for fast reflects. As you can tell, I’m not PVE-er =P!

To be honest, I get what you’re saying here although I’ve played all their games. I think of the bunch I disliked Bastion the most. It felt like an empty PSX game. I liked Transistor, but the catch is that it needed to be played pretty much surrounding their pause-the-battle technique which was okay but it really kind of sucks to me whenever I have any game use this technique. I would have much rather it had been a full turn-based game. I like turn-based games though. There is some viking game that plays like a janky-table top where it’s semi-turnbased and it was absolutely awful for it.

Mind you, I like Transistor due to its story. Which I think is the same reason why I liked Pyre. The setting, it was quite nice and if I could remove the mini-games from the game I would. Hades, I liked because they took characters the size of tic-tacs and turned them into three-dimensional beings. That was quite nice. They played on a lot of anime tropes. The gameplay was good, but it was a bit too challenging for me. I dropped it relatively early due to this. I pretty much sit in the same camp now. I wondered if maybe I had aged out of their target audience but I will probably never play one of their games again. It’s just not my bag.

To be honest, I felt like Hades was like GOOFILY sexual. But I get why it works for most people. I just was like…wut!? People are horny for Hades folks, including my sibby. So like, it works. I just don’t play games for that kind of stuff is all. I also liked their art more when it was air-brushy over the hard comic lines. Which is kind of crazy, because I like comic book art. It’s just like…too much for me. My sibby grabbed Hades 2 and I can’t bring myself to play it.

Also they’re assholes of accessibility. It’s so hard to play Hades because outside of the gauntlets you’ve gotta mash buttons to get through the whole damn thing. I know I am not the only one who’s written to them about this, but they never gave a shit about it. I figured I was pretty much done with them because I have had such positive responses from so many indie developers on accessibility options. Which I think to be absolutely honest, should be a standard for games with larger budgets. Which they for sure had, as far as indie games go. eh.

That was a rant and a half.

To be honest, I think they only made a sequel to Hades because it was so popular. I actually quite like that they create new universes every game. I also like the core gameplay of Pyre (not so much the mini-games) unlike most people. It sort of feels like Ballmasterz turned into a super cereal game to me. It probably inspired the show, which ever came first.

Oh, you got it too!

Pulled a Saltburn =)

I’ve never had that problem myself either. I took a break there for quite some time with my gaming but I did grow up with it, and I have returned to it. I can’t think of a time when I have played a game - even a story based one, and liked it and haven’t returned to it at least once more. I think I’ve noticed though, I am kind of a gaming minority. I think the funniest thing I can say about games is that back when I played with a big rowdy group of guys a game would last however long it lasted because the guys would fight and swap for whoever was controlling the character and we’d play that shit into the ground regardless of how long a game was. The last system I had was a PS2, so idk but I knew a lot of complaints started coming out PS3 era. Snap even was a game that we played like crazy. I had a friend who had a N64, and Pokemon was so hot! And we’d all just sit there and see if we could do “perfect” runs even though it was pretty much the same game over and over again.

Speaking of trends, I mean I guess these things have always existed but I think the PS3 began the genre my girlfriend lovingly describes as “penis games” which have hyper-masculine protagonist smashing the shit out of everything with dynamic lighting. I don’t mean to offend anyone with this, but the trend is still here (I am just guessing it’s Unreal graphics). I know it existed before the PS3, but it really took off then and was part of what actually turned me off of gaming as a whole.

It’s quite funny that Strange Scaffolding seems to embrace uncertainty with er…uncertainty. As in, they keep things explicitly contract based in order to keep people from expending too much time and energy into a singular project. I’ve always thought of contract work as something rockier due to taxes, benefits, etc. I think though, they’re just ahead of the curb and if they’re successful enough more power to them. Clearly something is a bit amiss though, if the head of the place can’t afford a ticket to GDC. I do like however, that they showed up to socialize regardless. Which is pretty much the main reason to show up to one of these anyways.

I also remember when people would constantly say that games were too short. I didn’t play them at the time, but there was a period when everyone was complaining about waiting for a long time for games - paying a lot for a game, and then finishing it in 5-7 hours and never playing it again.

I think in general people’s attention spans wax and wane. I will say I think there’s a series of things you can do that can help put on a presentation, even if you’re “bad” at it. I think practice makes perfect. You don’t have to be a parrot, but you should be familiar with whatever you want to present. The Sims had it right when the little person talks in front of the mirror to be more charismatic. I mean, you don’t have to do that, but a kind person forgives a sea of “umms” and most people are not kind. I got some great advice a hundred years back to basically write your speech, hit it until it sounds natural, and then put it in an outline. Have cheater notes so to speak, where you can lead yourself conversationally. Use that, then when you have a handle of that knock it down to just bullet points. By that point you’ll pretty much own your presentation, which gives you an air of authority, which is the entire point of a presenter typically. It’s how I cheat the system, and I’ve given presentations on a large and small scale before (not often, but have done so in the past). I absolutely dreaded it at first and even dropped out of school because I didn’t want to take a speech class (no lie). The wonderful human mentioned above helped guide me to the finish line, and I am so terribly thankful for that. Time, talking to every kind of human under the sun made pretty much everything better. That’s why I said the last bit on the bottom.

I am not a quick person, I wish I were. Witty people kill me, because they’re so quick. It takes time for me to mull things over in my head, to respond. Even medicated, it’s just an uphill battle unfortunately. I can’t play the crowd, and I wish I could. Pretty much the only way I have learned to “cheat the system” is to approach situations where I need to be authoritative like above. But likewise you’ve gotta say the “right” things. By that I mean if you’re going to ask for audience participation, you’ve got to do so in a fun and succinct way. People don’t tend to like cringey introspective questions unless it’s done in a fun and stupid way. Of course this whole damn thing is cause of comic. I just always try to impart this knowledge I’ve gotten because most people will have to give a presentation at some point and this advice I got saved my life. So I try to keep the spirit alive by passing it on =)